Sackville first Canadian community to join network

SACKVILLE, N.B. – Sackville Schools 2020 (SS2020) has been invited to join a new community-supported education network with The Education Redesign Lab at Harvard University. The Education Re-Design Lab was founded and is led by Paul Reville, the Francis Keppel Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former Massachusetts Secretary of Education. The Lab’s mission is to partner with communities to build integrated education and child development systems, to research and disseminate best practices in the field, and to advance a new vision for education that is community-based, with support and coordination at the grassroots level.

Reville and his colleagues have been working with members of the SS2020 group over the past six months, as they look to smaller, rural and international partners that are proposing an integrated education model grounded in a community supported environment. Sackville has been invited to join the network of community-supported schools and will be featured as a rural community that proposes a public education system from pre-school to post-secondary education focusing on partnerships and experiential learning. The SS2020 committee has been working closely with principals and teachers in the Tantramar family of schools and has gained significant support across the province. Mayor John Higham, MLA Bernard LeBlanc, MP Dominic LeBlanc, and Minister of Education Brian Kenny have endorsed this new model of education and SS2020 committee members are eagerly awaiting a decision on funding and process from Premier Brian Gallant, as part of the government’s education and the new economy initiative.

As part of their By All Means program, the Re-Design Lab works with towns and cities by approaching learning as a community endeavor. They call upon community groups, youth groups, the hospital, the university, sports groups and others to step up and help kids get the resources needed to be successful in school. They also look at spaces where children learn and they see the larger community as the appropriate scale for integrated approaches to learning. Members of SS2020 will be joining the research network meetings at Harvard on July 11-13 to develop the partnership and learn from the six places already engaged in the Network of American Communities. Sackville and New Brunswick will be the first Canadian community to join the network.